This blog is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to
transform schooling as we know it, to help all students realise their
talents, passions and dreams. Be great to hear from anyone out there! Feel free to add a comment to Bruce's Blog and enter e-mail to receive postings

Educational Readings- literacy/school reform b/s / and the arts

“Certainly,
as we turn to online reading, the physiology of the reading process itself
shifts; we don’t read the same way online as we
do on paper. “

“The
tangibility of paper versus the intangibility of something digital.” The
contrast of pixels, the layout of the words, the concept of scrolling versus
turning a page, the physicality of a book versus the ephemerality of a screen,
the ability to hyperlink and move from source to source within seconds online—all
these variables translate into a different reading experience.”

Brain waves show learning to read does not end in 4th grade,
contrary to popular theory

“Teachers-in-training
have long been taught that fourth grade is when students stop learning to read
and start reading to learn. But a new study tested the theory by analyzing
brain waves and found that fourth-graders do not experience a change in
automatic word processing, a crucial component of the reading shift theory.
Instead, some types of word processing become automatic before fourth grade,
while others don't switch until after fifth.”

“Education
is filled with jargon, buzzwords, and BS. I've had a lot of fun over the years
skewering the inanity that gets bandied about in education research and
professional development. Education policy and school reform are rife with
their own vapid vocabulary.

A must read!!!

It's worth flagging this stuff. Doing so reminds us that fatuous
phrases don't make problems go away.It helps
puncture sugarplum visions fueled by hot air. Left unchallenged, pat phrases
allow wishful thinking to stand in for messy realities. After all, these
fatuous phrases are pervasive. Hell, I've lapsed into using them...plenty of
times.So this is less about calling anybody out than ensuring
that we don't let pleasant words stand in for careful thinking. Here are 10
phrases that, when heard, should cause listeners to ask the speaker to explain
what he or she means, using words that actually mean something:”

“Teachers
have to make their lessons dull and mechanical during Ofsted inspections in an
attempt

to be judged “outstanding” instead
of making the lessons enjoyable and creative a report has claimed. In a wide
ranging report by the University of Sunderland, researchers found that teachers
are constrained by the structure of the school day and the push for conformity
is hindering progress in “deprived” schools.”

Hey GERMERS, maybe you should read this …Oh sorry, I forgot -
you prefer ideology to evidence. My mistake.

“Advocates
for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would
be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA
scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in

So much for charter schools

Swedish education? Researchers and
policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the
choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for
American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean
that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a
bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do
so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.”

Quest to Learn has featured in previous reading
lists. Here’s another article.

“Digital games can
be amazing tools, but only when used to make it easier to contextualize the
gifts we’ve
received from Shakespeare, Socrates, Euclid, and others. The thing about tools
is that their strength is usually derived from the way they approach a problem
rather than in the particularity of the solution they offer. For example,
consider the hammer: a great technological innovation that our

human ancestors
imagined more than 2 million years ago. What made it revolutionary was not so
much in the material from which it was assembled, nor the particular object it
bashed. Instead, the hammer was revolutionary because it forever transformed
human experience by introducing the possibility of striking, and therefore
altering, our natural surroundings. It changed the way we look at things.”

“Learning
should be passion-driven rather than data-driven and focus on the needs of students
rather than the needs of the tests. Classroom activities shouldprovide numerous opportunities for students to connect with their
dreams, feelings, interests, and other people rather than demand students read
closely and stay connected to text.”

“The
realities of standardized tests and increasingly structured, if not
synchronized, curriculum continue to build classroom stress levels.
Neuroimaging research reveals the disturbances in the brain's learning circuits
and neurotransmitters that accompany stressful learning environments. The
neuroscientific research about learning has revealed the negative impact of
stress and anxiety and the

qualitative improvement of the brain circuitry
involved in memory and executive function that accompanies positive motivation
and engagement.”

“Joy
and enthusiasm are absolutely essential for learning to happen -- literally,
scientifically, as a matter of fact and research. Shouldn't it be our challenge
and opportunity to design learning that embraces these ingredients?”

This article comes from a site run by US
educator Kieran Egan (thanks to Robert Valiant of the US ‘Dump
Duncan’Facebook page for bringing it to
my attention). Egan’s
site has a lot to explore and is highly recommended.

Bruce’s comment.’This article gives insight to
his thinking –that young learners have powerful, rich, affective imaginative lives
that we lose as we grow and that a developmental

approach (that we move from
the simple concrete to the abstract) fails to recognise. The idea that students
learn though stories and metaphors is worth thinking about.’

“I
want to suggest that the problem we find ourselves in--sidelining the arts
increasingly even though we recognize their centrality to education--is in part
tied up in our having accepted a set of basic educational ideas that are
mistaken. That is, I want to make the uncomfortable case that the root of the
problem is a set of ideas that most readers of this article probably take for
granted.”

First up is a series of art relate links, a discipline that Bruce is
passionate about.

Arts Teach Deep Noticing

Bruce: Exposure to the arts teaches observation, or deep noticing.
There is a difference, as you know, between looking and looking closely. When
students are asked to draw something, they must look closely to accurately
observe the lines and shapes of the object they are trying to portray. Students
learn to see tiny differences and to record them. Doesn't this sound like what
a scientist does.

Bruce: Video Clip about drawing. Many people
think camera and computers have made drawing obsolete. Through drawing you
learn to see the world as if for the first time. Drawing is a way of asking
questions and drawing answers. It slows the pace of the mind and as a result of
drawing the world looks different. In our classrooms too many spoil their work
by rushing( thinking first finished is best) This slowing the pace of mind is
hard to achieve with a camera – although cameras are great for gathering
visual ideas.

Pasi Sahlberg:
Five U.S. innovations that helped Finland’s schools improve but that American reformers now ignore

Bruce: Time to get back to Finland –enough of this
neoliberal GERM nonsense that has infected education in Australia, the UK , the
US and next year in New Zealand if no change of government.

“The
question should not be: “How to have more innovation in education?” The
real question is: “How to make the best use of all existing
educational ideas that are somewhere in American schools and universities?” The
answer is not to have more charter schools or private ownership of public
schools to boost innovation. The lesson from the most successful education
systems is this: Education policies should not be determined by mythology and
ideology but guided by research and evidence from home and abroad.”

Transforming Secondary Education – the most
difficult challenge of all.Thoughts from a past age – ‘Young
Lives at Stake’ by Charity James

Bruce’s
comment: An oldie butrelevant for rethinking education for students from middle
school to senior secondary. Based on thinking developed 40 years ago by Charity
James, the approach provides the basis for a truly transformed education based
on developing the gifts and talents of all students.Very much in line with the intent of thelargely side-lined ,
2007 New

Zealand Curriculum which asks schools to develop students as ‘seekers, users and creators of their own
knowledge’.

“Secondary
schools, if anything, remain determined to lock both teachers and students in a
fossilised 1950s punitive environment of isolated specialist teaching,
arbitrary periods of time, timetables, streaming by ability, uniforms and
hierarchal power structures. Such schools are dysfunctional but there seems
little pressure to change them – instead teachers are criticized for
students’ lack of success and even
poverty is not to be seen as an excuse.”

“Maieutic
strategies convey midwifery roles to teachers; and the strategies towards the
right-hand end of the continuum imply that a child’s natural desire to learn is helped to manifest itself as the child

develops. The teacher is there at the birth of learning of something new and
nourishes the child’s personal control of
it. Learnacy is part of a child’s psyche from birth
and its development is the real business of the concerned teacher. The
pupilling processes accelerate cognitive development with genuine concern for
achievement.”

Another gem from Phil that is everyone (not just
teachers) should read.

“Profit
before people. Profit before social services. Profit before environmental
welfare. Profit.Profit. Profit.Leads to : Men before women. White before black. Right-wing before Left-wing.
Sycophancy before experience. Adults before children. Bureaucrats before Mums.
Testing before learning.”

“In
one of Sydney's most striking public buildings, the age of students will not
dictate what they learn, teenagers and preschoolers will study together and
Skype hubs will put students in daily contact with their peers around the
world.”

“Professor
Heppell said the recipe could include developing the school as a village for
all learners of all ages, creating small schools within the school, a focus on
studying "by stage not age" and ensuring it was technology rich with
a global focus.”

Another expert for the Australian government to
ignore, mind you, given Prime Minister Tony Abbbott. who’d be surprised?

“Internationally
renowned education expert Dr Yong Zhao told principals in Brisbane on Thursday
there was a global mismatch between skill shortages and unemployment and
schools need to shift from “a sausage-making model”,
in which they produced students with similar skills and similar knowledge, to
one that encouraged creativity and entrepreneurialism.”